An Evolving Exploration into the Head, Heart and Hands of Energy Descent
Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Members of Transition Town Barcelona head off on their 'Caminata'
In Europe, exciting news from Ferney-Voltaire, which has decided to become a Transition Town and they’ve just started their awareness raising activities, so welcome to them. SQYenTransition in France have this great project with the lovely name of verger dans ma ville…an orchard in my city. And for an idea worth sharing, have a look at Transition Town Barcelona’s La Caminata, or Transition Walkabout…a nice idea that helps you get to know your town and community more, and helps them to get to know about you too.
Well now here’s something wonderful from Transition York Region in Canada. I won’t say much about it, just sit back and enjoy… can’t help wishing they might perhaps move around a bit more though…
In June 2008, David Fleming was in Totnes to teach on the ‘Life After Oil’ course at Schumacher College, along with Richard Heinberg, myself and others. One afternoon, David and I slipped away so I could interview him for this website. In memory of his passing away this week, I am reprinting it here. We discussed peak oil and Tradable Energy Quotas, among other things. It was a joy.
How do you see the unfolding events of the past few weeks? (ie. the runaway price and it starting to make the price of petrol/diesel rise, with the impacts being felt acutely by those on lower incomes and in rural areas)?
Well, this is the beginning of the breakdown of the energy market. High prices are a sign that some people are having to forgo some or all of the oil which they would have expected to buy. In some cases, those purchases are absolutely essential to their livelihoods, and if they are priced out of the market in the oil auction, they will not be able to do really fundamental things like buying the kerosene they need to power their irrigation pumps. So far, most of those who have been affected to this extent are the poor – third world farmers, for instance. But it is coming our way.
Transition Town Totnes has been running now for just over 4 years, and recently a group of us sat down to try and capture what has actually been achieved by the process. It has been a very illuminating process, one that is very useful to do in terms of being able to get a sense of what has actually been achieved on the ground (I highly recommend it). The name of the report, ‘So, what does Transition Town Totnes actually do?‘, comes from the question often asked by visitors to the town who come to see a Transition town, wander round the High Street and wonder why there are still cars and not windmills everywhere. This report is designed to explain all that is going on below the surface (as well as on top of it…).
After a hectic day at the Diverse Routes to Belonging conference here in Edinburgh, I sat down here to blog about it, but having had a look at the conference’s blog, I’m not sure there is much I can add! The conference team have done an amazing job, doing excellent write ups of the sessions and workshops as well as films of interviews with Alan Stibbe, Alastair Macintosh, Jonathan Dawson and myself, and also films of Justin Kenrick’s opening talk and the mapping activity. It is real state-of-the-art conference blogging, great stuff. My workshop seemed to go OK too. There are also Transition gatherings going on in Hannover and in Brazil over this weekend, and we tried to do Skype chats with both at the end of the day, as well as with groups in Portugal and Spain, but only the Portugese and Brazilian ones really worked. Oh well. So, been an amazing day, I’d better get back for the Open Mike… keep an eye on the blog tomorrow and perhaps I’ll write something more useful when I get home….
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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